Eventually I began to flower as a comedy writer when I created some crazy impressions. I would do an impression of James Madison, fourth president of the United States, who was married to Dolley Madison. And I’d do stuff like, “Dolley! Hurry! Set out the fruit salad! Franklin and Jefferson will be here any minute!” And I knew nobody could quarrel with the historical accuracy of my powerful, stentorian James Madison.
But the Jews were a tough audience. I used to do a “Man of a Thousand Faces.” I’d hold up a finger and say “one” and then make a crazy face, with blown-out cheeks and crossed eyes like Harpo Marx. Sometimes they’d wait for a hundred and fifty crazy faces before I got my first laugh.
All of the comics in the Borscht Belt had opening songs. They became your identity songs. Don Appell had one he did: “My name is Donny; they say I’m funny!” All the comedians named Jackie had the same identity song. “They call me Jackie; they say I’m wacky!”
I came up with a song to introduce myself to the audience. Upon reflection, it’s maybe a bit too self-congratulatory.
It goes like this:
Here I am, I’m Melvin Brooks.
I’ve come to stop the show.
Just a ham who’s minus looks,
But in your hearts I’ll grow!
I’ll tell ya gags, sing ya songs.
Happy little snappy tunes that roll along.
Out of my mind, won’t you be kind and
Please love…Melvin Brooks!
It always got a big hand.
The Borscht Belt was so important for my training in comedy. I think it was there that I first learned my craft. The audiences were very tough. They didn’t give it away. When you got a laugh, you really earned it. Those audiences sharpened your ability to survive and sometimes triumph over disastrous performances.
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Let me digress for a moment…I have a message for those readers who are setting out to make a career for themselves as writers or comedians. I call it “An Ode to Failure.”
Before achieving success in my career, I failed on large scales and small ones. During my time in the Catskills, some jokes worked and some didn’t. As a result, you didn’t just not do those jokes again, you learned what the audience expects, what they want. And then you have to learn a bigger lesson: Don’t give them what they expect! Give them what they don’t know and what they don’t expect and maybe you’ll get an even bigger explosion of laughter.
Failure is vital. It is an incredibly important quotient in the equation of a career. After you wipe away your tears, it’s not a bad experience and under the right circumstances it will make you better, both as a person and as an artist.
I think it’s important to fail, especially between the ages of twenty and thirty. Success is like sugar. It’s too good. It’s too sweet. It’s too wonderful and it burns up very quickly. Failure is like corned beef hash. It takes a while to eat. It takes a while to digest. But it stays with you. Failure may not feel good when it happens, but it will always sharpen your mind. You’ll always ask yourself, “Where did I go wrong? Why didn’t this joke or this sketch work?” And there will always be reasons. You can’t just say, “Well, it’s not funny.” You have to ask yourself, “Why is it not funny?”
My son Max, who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, gave the graduation speech at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he went for his undergraduate degree. To the graduating class, he said, “Go forth and fail.”
He was absolutely on target, because nothing helps you to succeed like failure.
Chapter 3
World War II
By this point I knew I wanted to go into show business, but Hitler had started a war. It was 1943 and my mother had three blue stars hanging in the window, meaning she had three boys in the service—all of my older brothers. Thank god none of them were gold, because a gold star meant that you lost a child in combat.
My brother Bernie was fighting in the South Pacific and eventually became a Japanese code breaker. Lenny was fighting in the Fifteenth Air Force as an engineer gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress stationed in Foggia, Italy. And Irving was a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps and fighting his way every day across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
Lenny was a true hero. The December 20, 1943, edition of the New York Herald Tribune reported:
N.Y. Flyer Freezes Hands, Repairs Gun at 32 Below
Flesh Sticks to Metal, but He Carries Out Mission
WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (AP)—With full knowledge of the consequences, Staff Sergeant Kaminsky, of 111 Lee Avenue, Brooklyn, peeled off his heavy gloves to repair his jammed machine gun in the waist of a Flying Fortress at a height of five miles and in a temperature of 32 degrees below zero during a recent mission against an Austrian target, the War Department said today.
Kaminsky’s hands froze almost immediately—as he knew they would. His fingers swelled to twice normal size, and the skin of his hands stuck to the steel as he worked. But he repaired the gun and went back into action to help fight off German fighter planes as his Flying Fortress was returning from an attack on the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Wiener-Neustadt.
Now in a hospital, he is recuperating.
Fortunately, but unfortunately, his hands healed quickly, and he went right back into action. On the day Lenny was supposed to come home, they changed the requirement from twenty-five to fifty missions. On his thirty-sixth mission he was shot down and captured as a prisoner of war. When he bailed out of the plane, he ripped his dog tags off because they read “A-Blood Type, H” and H meant Hebrew. He had heard that Jewish flyers were being sent to concentration camps, which was likely certain death.
When he was arrested on the ground by the Germans, they threw him into a prisoner of war camp and asked, “Papolsky?” Meaning, “Are you Polish?”
He said, “Yeah. Yeah. Papolsky.”
For nineteen months, he was in a Stalag Luft, an air force prison camp. He got through it, but he never would have made it if the Germans found out that he was Jewish.
We held our breaths for a month and a half until we got word from the Red Cross that he was alive and a prisoner of war. The Red Cross went to prisoners of war and they did a lovely thing, they recorded them saying or singing things and they sent those recordings to their loved ones back home.
Lenny loved to sing so he recorded a song called “Miss You.” My mother would put that little cardboard record on every night and cry. Every single night! Finally I said, “Mom, maybe just hold the record? Maybe don’t put it on so much? I mean he’s alive, but it’s depressing hearing him sing every night!”
Even though we loved him dearly, truth is he was slightly off-key.
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